GTM Engineer Interview: Salary, Skills & Career Advice (2025)

So, Ryan, tell me a little bit about yourself. What are you doing now? What makes you want to get into the GTM engineering role? All that good stuff.

Yeah, yeah. So a little bit about me. I come from a sales background. I had a dad in sales leadership for 30 plus years. Kind of just fell into a sales role where I found a lot of success and then decided, you know what, let's keep the ball rolling. I. I found success. I think I'm gonna be able to do this for a while. And a couple months ago, I started dabbling with automations for myself to kind of boost my productivity and my sales roles. Tools like Zapier and N8N. And I found I really enjoyed it. And I got the same kind of high from finishing an automation and seeing it come to life as I did from clarity, closing a deal in sales. So GTM engineering sounds to me like a marriage of the two or at least some sort of middle ground. So that's, that's kind of my, my path here to this conversation. Other than that, you know, I'm a San Diego native. I am pretty tech forward. I, I love AI. I think it's, you know, the fourth industrial revolution and something that I just want to be on the forefront of.

Absolutely. Honestly, I completely understand because I had like such a similar experience. You know, my entire life has like always been sales as well. But I made a transition. Like I've owned a few companies and exited a few, and I've always was in love with like building the automation. So in 2020, I was, I owned a marketing agency because I learned how to run Facebook ads. So I owned a marketing agency for all real estate agents, generating leads for them. And like, by the time I got to like my first year, end of the first year, like, we've scaled the company really big. And I was like, but what if I could like every Covid, of course, shut everything down. So I was like, how can I, like create a virtual call center? That's when I started like digging into Zapier and all these other things. And that what you talked about, the feeling of like completing an automation is almost like the same high as like closing a deal. I felt it completely. So I definitely get what you're talking about, but you gotta love it. You gotta have that feeling, like the feeling you have. That's the only way to like, to really even get into this type of industry because it's such a constant. Like your brain is always. It's like a Rubik's cube every day.

Yep.

Yeah.

And the frustrations come with it too. I mean, I, I've had times where I want to punch a hole in the wall because I've been, you know, hour five trying to fix one specific bug, you know, on N8N in the vibe coding section that I'm working on. But I'm curious, so what, what, what made you realize that there was a place for you to take these skills that you were naturally building in zapier and stuff? And where do you work now? What are you doing specifically right now?

So I, I had a cleaning company for the last, basically two and a half, three years. Right. So within, I just exited from it. It was a, it was a very, it was a happy day.

But congratulations.

Thank you. But after that, you know, even while I was exiting, I was like, hey, let me go back to corporate or something like that. But I was like, I want to build systems. I don't want to be in sales, I don't want to do any of that. I was like, I think I'm past that stage of my life, especially with the things that I've done. You know, there's, I mean I have like the, the Fortune 500 companies, but I have real life results that I understand how to scale businesses. So from there what happened was actually somebody reached out to me. They found me through YouTube. They're like, hey, we like loved all your stuff on YouTube. What happened to it? And they're, they're a company, they build AI automations. Well, let me rephrase. They don't build anything. They have me build everything. But they're really good at selling. So I was like, when they reached out, I was like, yeah, just doing this, that and the other. And they're like, we actually need a GTM engineer this around like seven, eight months ago. I know my LinkedIn, it says I just got hired. No, I just updated my LinkedIn now, but this was around seven, eight months ago. And I was like, yeah, I was like, I could build out whatever you want, this, that and the other. And then they're like, yeah, we're going to bring you on full time. And I was like, I could do, I'm open to doing a year contract. I don't want to commit, like three to five years and like, oh, I'm gonna be here forever. Because I, I know that I'm not, especially with the skill sets that I have. I don't, I don't need to so to say so. Yeah, I started working with them and honestly, like, they're called Soma AI and I loved just being able to create every single day because when they bring a client, it's always a new client that has a new problem. And I hate saying it, but a lot of companies, even though I made a LinkedIn post, everyone was like going crazy on me. A lot of companies are looking for AI SDR bots or AISDRs, I should say. And it just goes to show like we are in such a great opportunity right now. Because if you can look at your day to day job right now and say, hey, I do this every single day, I know I can automate it. That's going to be your first step in the GTM engineering.

Right, Right. And yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know if the SDR bots are all there yet compared to, you know, an SDR that is really experienced, but you sure can help every single SDR with automation because there's always busy work involved. And so that kind of leads me into another question I'm curious about. What do you think that hiring managers, and I know you had a little bit of a different foray into this than I might, but what do you think hiring managers really look for on a resume and just in a GTM engineer candidate?

It's actually a great question. I really like that question. They look for results because as a GTM engineer, you can't fake results. You know, if I'm sitting in an interview just like six, I do consulting on the side as well. For I build out other, you know, I engineer other sales processes for companies. But you can't fake it. When I literally just show you like, hey, this is what I've built. Watch. You watch. Fill out this form and watch it get to work.

Right, right.

You know, the resume in the experience is going to get you through the door. Like if you've been in sales for a while, I think that's one thing they look for because you're going to control the entire sales process in reality. So from there you just now have to show them your technical side. And what I love about it is like, let's just say you want to go work at, let's just say Clay. All right. And let's say you've built out an automation for them. All I would do is send my resume and then put a loom video. It's like, hey, putting my money where my mouth is. This is what I've built. That's it. That's what I love about this. It's like sales. When you get on an interview for a sales job, they're going to test you on a role play. Either you got it or you don't.

So that makes sense. So if you were me, then, 27, sales background, several months into learning Zapier and N8N. And I don't think anyone can be a fully comprehensive expert on these platforms because there's unlimited customizability on N8N and there's 7,000 plus apps on Zapier. And a lot of the learning that you do happens in context right while you're working on the projects. So if you were me, what would you do over the next three to six months? What would you focus on to become an undeniable candidate?

You got great questions, you know that, Ronnie, you should like get into like podcasting. You really should.

Don't tempt me.

I would really focus heavily on Zapier. Zapier. Zapier. I think we all need to figure out, come to a terms what we're going to call it N8N. But now I would really focus on building your portfolio. Even if it's a mock portfolio. The job, the job postings. Oh, we're looking for somebody who can do X, Y and Z for our sales process and connect this and do that. So inside the job posting on LinkedIn, like, Hey, I built it, right? Here it is. You know what it's, here's the, here's the template, here's a video of how it works, here's my resume. Like, what more can they argue at that point? Because you got to remember this job position is still new, so they don't even know what they're looking for. I have people, I have GTM engineers right now, full title at some very pretty decent sized tech companies asking me how do I build an automation? And I'm like, well, I'll tell you how to build an automation. If you told me how you got the job without knowing how to build.

I want to know too.

So because a lot of people are getting, they're getting basically promoted, that's all it is. Because nobody knows what like a GTM engineer actually does. So they're like, oh, they're good at sales. I'm sure they could replicate the sales process for us and like help us like automate it and things like that. So it's really a free for all at this moment, which is a gift and a curse.

Interesting. So then what specific projects would you throw into a portfolio? And you know, what pieces gave you credibility? What were the ones that made your people go, hey, you know, this is awesome.

Appointment settings. So Anything. So prospecting. I built a prospecting bot. I built that. When? Before I even got before the company I work at now. So my AI, before they even reached out to me, I already had it. So I just showcased what I had.

Yeah, yeah.

And then I hate to say it like this, if this is where companies are going, they want to remove SDRs. They just want to. It's a 70 to 100k a year title. The problem isn't what they're paying them. The problem is the success rate on SDRs being paid is not that high. You have 10 SDRs, only two of them are good. You're spending $800,000 a year for what?

Yeah, yeah, it's true, it's true. And you know, I've seen companies out there, even my girlfriend's company is getting ready to hire like 20 more SDRs to their team of eight. And you know, I'm. Obviously that means they're doing really well, but I just wonder, you know, have they explored this avenue? Have they, you know, what kind of considerations have they given to automation? And then I think there's probably a debate between third party companies coming in versus hiring your own internal GTM engineer. Right? I mean, there's probably going to be companies that are just full of GTM engineers and they're almost like a consultancy. So, you know, maybe, maybe that's the next big thing. But what do you think this is another one I'm really curious about. What do you think the career path is for a GTM engineer? Where do you go from there? Do you think that's just going to flow with the technology, flow with AI or where does that go?

Full transparency? It's going to be. Well, let me take a step back where I think the market is going. What companies are actually going to be looking for are people who can build internal tools so they can build their own version of clay inside their company. I don't think that the software, the SaaS model, subscription model is going to last much longer. Maybe two, three years if that AI is going so fast. Two years. AI does if. I don't even want to know where AI is going to be in two years because look what it did in three years and then three months, that one month. Now within one week, every single week it's something new. So I believe the future of companies are going to be changing their business models to internal tools. And a lot of these SaaS companies are going to be building internal tools for other companies and maybe be charging on usage rather than monthly subscription. So I want to frame that there then in terms of like what happens to guys like us. This is just a prediction. We get to look at this video a few years from now and see if I was right. I think what's going to happen is more GTM engineers are going to gain confidence and they're going to take consulting routes. No GTM engineer is going to work within a company. Because if you're taking a company from 1 million arrows to 10 million in 12 months due to AI in a few AI co pilots and maybe one or two SDRs, and you're the one who created the system, why would you stick around at a company?

True, true. Do you, do you use things like Replit or Base44 and any of these. No. Code building apps?

Yes.

As part of. Yeah. As part of your work?

Yes.

How do you use them?

I don't like it. Well, like, I don't like it at all. Like they're not there yet.

Yeah.

So I prefer when we work with clients at my, in my, in my day job. Right. Or even just in my consult, the consulting side of things that I do, I always tell them like, hey, I'm going to build the AI workflow, the agent. I do not want to connect it to a lovable or replit. Because now you're going to, you're. It's an additional layer that you're about to create because you do need security X, Y and Z. Like so many other things that I don't want to be held liable for. And I don't think that it's really, it's not. If you have a user interface for your workflow, it's not going to make or break it.

Right.

But yes, we do, I do do it. And we connect everything from N8N into, let's just say lovable. It's pretty much a prompt that it'll be through web hooks so they could just connect to each other. Like you have your webhook from N8N, you'll have your web hook from lovable. You can just basically ask it to create one and then you just copy it into N8N and they just start communicating. But it's good. But it, there's a lot of bugs and I'm not a fan of it. When I deliver a product, I want to deliver something solid. Not pretty, but it's like every time you click this button, the button is going to button correctly.

Right, Right. And you know, that's, that's another thing. We may be able to look back on this and say Even six months from now, maybe, maybe they get there, right? And then they think things all change again. But I mean, it's, you know, it's funny how we say that, right? We're thinking they're not there yet, it's still buggy. But two years ago we would have been like, what the heck is this? This is crazy. Yeah, so those are, those are always thought to flow through my mind. But let's get a little more cynical or cautious here for a second. I, I want to know what your view is on red flags to look for in a job description or a company that's looking for, you know, automations. What's something that you would avoid that you see or hear from a company?

My man Ryan's good.

I gotta know this stuff.

So the biggest red flag is this. And I would say, and this is including with a job, even if it's not like AI related or GTM engineering related. If they say what is what, it's everyone saying it. Now, we want you to lead our sales process, build out and pioneer in founding this and founding sdr. You don't want to be founding anything because as a GTM engineer, we create processes and make processes better. We do not build prop. We don't take things from 0 to 1, we take it from 1 to 100. So a lot of companies, I get messages every day on LinkedIn. Everyone's like, oh, I have this offer, I want to build an AI sdr. I was like, great. What does your manual process look like for outreach etc? Is it ads, is it Cold email? LinkedIn? Oh, I don't have one right now. Well, sir, what would you like me to build for you? Like what am I, what are we automating if there's not even a manual process?

Right, right.

So beware of companies who have no actual sales process and a lot of them don't. Because if, if you go into a company with no process, there's nothing you can do to make the process work. Our job is to amplify it is not to do the job of the sdr, the AE rev ops. No, there's, it's supposed to already. Then we go in and say, hey, we're sdr. We're going to automate your prospecting marketing. Oh, these were the ads that worked really well. Okay, great. I'm going to create some sort of AI workflow where we can keep spitting out this same type of copy or something similar to this ad or this type of template, things like that ae. Great. You need notes taken or you want a bot that when an SDR books an appointment that for you on your calendar, all they have to do is fill out a form, and then I can have an AI workflow do all the research on the prospect for you so you have your notes. Great, let me do that. But as a GTM engineer, we are not engineering nada, nitty nada from zero to one.

Right. That's a great, that's a great nugget right there. You don't want to be founding anything. That, that's something to keep in mind. So, so then let's say you get on board with a company that has a lot of manual processes. You know, it's a strong role. They, they know what they want. What's a fair salary range for an entry level GTM engineer? A more experienced one? What's the range?

All right, well, you live in California, so unfortunately there's no range that can ever help you guys.

True, true.

But if I was just starting, right, And I have no, like, if I had no background or case studies or track record, I would start at $80,000 per year, but do that for about a year, build up, you know? You know, just like any other job. But after that, 110, 120 minimum salary, plus OTE. So you really should be at 200 a year, right?

All right, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you're, you're, you're saving a lot of people a lot of time if you do your job well.

Exactly. And people are willing to pay it. I'm seeing on LinkedIn now, I'm seeing job offers for 130, 140 base, and I'm like. And they don't even really. Once again, this is a undeveloped job title and they're still making that amount of money.

That's, that's the crazy part is just I, you know, you wonder if the job poster even fully understands and especially the interviewer, right? Whoever's doing an interview, do they really understand what the role is going to entail? I mean, do they know people that have done this role before? Maybe not. I'm not sure if, you know, it's the wild west right now, so that's.

The time to get in because now.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

You could just, like, now I know that when this contract is up, the next contract I'm going for will be for a quarter million dollars a year.

That's amazing.

I wouldn't accept anything less because I just. The roi, it's like, you can't fight the data, you know, I Don't care what their budget is. I'm like, this is what I do. This is what I can provide for you. There's. And once again, we're not planting. We're in a very blue ocean right now. We're where they can't just go put up a GTM engineering post and actually get someone who's good because it goes beyond N8N. It goes to the fact that they must understand actual sales processes and frameworks. So now you have to get a good salesperson who's also technical, who's also organized, who actually wants to sit there and learn about the newest AI and this and that and how many people are going to do that. People barely can use chat GPT correctly.

Yeah. And I mean, it's. It's really been the wave where I think AI is making people like people like us, people like you and me, more technical. And it's making people who are very technical. Well, maybe it's not yet, but it should be making them more creative. Right? I mean, and, you know, more literate in something like sales processes. Because if you're coming from the other side, if you're a software engineer and you want to be a GTM engineer, your gap is really just understanding the processes you just talked about. Right. Sales, marketing, this and that. And maybe you can have people who tell you, hey, I want this automated and this automated. But then they don't fully understand the capabilities of automation and they may not always ask for the right thing. So everything you're saying makes perfect sense. I think I've run through most of the questions that I wanted to ask you. I tried. This will be my golden goose egg or whatever right here. But I tried to frame a lot of the questions I wanted to ask you around things that you wouldn't necessarily be able to Google and get a great answer. So do you have anything else that you think is worth sharing that you wouldn't be able to Google? That would be something that came from experience.

Yeah, This one is. I'm actually making a video about it on YouTube a bit later, but I'll share it with you. It's. You have to understand, as a GTM engineer, what are the pro. What are the proper marketing channels for that company you're going to work at? Let me explain. So everyone on LinkedIn has this weird belief that they think that they need to be doing outbound messaging, you know, whatever, cold email, LinkedIn, whatever it may be. A lot of people have offers that are built for paid advertising. A lot of companies, they Offer their software, for example. Who can I give an example of? I just spoke with somebody, so I was, I have a call with someone, they wanted me to build out AI AISDR for them. They own a pizzeria. It's, it's a friend of mine, I worked with him before.

Right.

And I was like, you don't need cold email to reach corporations when you could just spend 50 to $100 a day on ads on Facebook giving away coupons for this offer. And that's it. You know, even down to, let's just say replica Replit doesn't need. They're hiring SDRs right now. And I'm like, well why would. If I was their GTM engineer, the first thing I would say is hey, we can hire for SDRs. But logically it wouldn't make sense. What I would rather do is we run ads. Maybe we run ads to a webinar showing people how to use Replit and then we have a call to action at the end of the webinar to either book a call with an AE or, or sign up for a 14 day free trial or 100 credit trial. But you have to understand that as a GTM engineer, it's not just building, it's understanding when it's time to pivot correctly because you may engineer the wrong thing.

A lot of iteration that probably goes on as, as things change. This is why in a specific company.

And this is why you don't want to go take a company from zero to one.

Yeah, yeah, that'll be, that'll be the thing that I, you know, take and apply the rest of the day as I look for roles to save projects to add to the portfolio from those job descriptions, you know.

Yeah, just founding nothing. The only people that I truly believe you should, if you're going to work a founding role, like if you were to come on board, let's just say at a startup, it would be anyone who's funded through why Combinator? Because they're willing to spend the money, they have no choice in reality but to spend the money.

True, true.

So, but find what aligns with you. And this is what I love about the GTM engineering role right now. I wholeheartedly believe we have one to two year Runway that if you learn everything you need to learn correctly, you can choose to work wherever you want. So it's not like being an AE or SDR nowadays where it's like you're almost forced to take what you can get right now. Everyone needs us. And then the minute you're actually in there and you're providing real value, intangible roi, they can't. You're not going to be replaceable because once again, the things we know is not something you can search on Google. It's not something you can even search on Chat GPT. You either got it or you don't.

Yeah, yeah. I went through my, my period of, you know, trying to build my first few workflows, just asking Chat gbt, hey, what do I do here? What do I do at this stuff? What do I do at this? It's not as good as you might think that the UIs are not aligned and not updated in these LLMs, so don't try that. For anyone out there listening.

It'S a fact. Chat GPT people think that they could do this job by prompting ChatGPT, but you can't. I mean, you can help. It's a co pilot. It's not the end all be all. But my tip and advice to you is write out everything, just one step at a time. Like when I build out my workflows, I literally write out exactly what it is that I want it to do. Quick little bullet notes, you know, Okay. I want the trigger to be this form. After that it has to. I'm going to have to do a HTTPs request, AKA basically a web hook to this in order to extract this information. Once I get this information now I need it to go to this sheet. But once it's in this sheet, I needed to send back over here and I just. Because if you try, like everyone tries to like go at it. They open up N8N and they're like, build. I'm like, no plan. Then you build one step at a time. And then after a While you've taken 20 steps and you've built this amazing automation and you're like, whoa, right? Phases. That's how you build them out. I can build out an automation, like 48 hours now in reality I could, I could have it perfect in 48 hours, but I could build it out in three. But my framework is always the pre preparation. The preparation takes me at least an hour and a half of writing. Exactly how.

Yeah, that's, that's where I do use LLMs, you know, I'll use it for the ideation part and I'm just like, hey, do you know if this is, this is possible? What are the general steps go from there? So.

Exactly.

But it's fun, fun stuff.

Do you know how to run paid ads yet? Like Facebook ads, Google Ads?

I'm Getting there. I, I worked for a marketing agency most recently and I got to sit in and listen on a lot of the discussions between the marketing team. So I do realize how valuable that is. But why do you ask? Is that something you suggest? Get going.

Highly recommend it. Because as I said, when as GTN GTM engineers, the role is going to develop and the requirements are going to be higher, you know, and I think eventually corporate in general, they're going to catch on to like, oh, shoot, we could have just used Google Ads and Facebook ads for this the entire time. So if you're in the know now, you're gonna be more than fine later. And the fact that you're even looking into this now, I think if you just take 90 days, don't look, look at job posts to see what they want and just those job posts build things around that, like little projects around those job posts then really get good. 90 days from now, I can guarantee you you can name your price because you'll be undeniable. Like, you can't deny somebody that has exactly like it's built. It's yes or no. And if they don't take it, the next company will. Because all of these companies are going to see a reoccurring pattern of what it is they want built out. Anything to keep metrics like organized, something to do, prospecting for SDRs, and maybe some internal tools for like note taking and things like that.

Right. Well, I feel like I'm the equivalent of 20 to 30 days in. So when I get to that point, I'll let you know and I'll let you know when I have that title on my, my LinkedIn.

I definitely want to hear about it when you do it because I think that it's really lifechanging. And then because beyond that, it's the growth that happens after. When you have the confidence to build a sales process for somebody, you don't see the world the same. Which is why I said like I took a year contract with soma because I'm like, I'm literally building all of this stuff. I could just go turn on some Facebook ads and do some out in cold emails and I can own the company. I just don't want to because I prefer to stay in my creative element. So little things to think about. But yeah. Did you have any other questions for me?

No. This was awesome. This was awesome. I appreciate the chance to take your brain on all this stuff and you know, I hope anyone who watches this video takes notes because you dropped a lot of good stuff. Good. Good knowledge.

Absolutely. Just take action, because we are very lucky to even recognize that this is real. And the fact that you're already dabbling in it, bro, it's just a matter of time. And the GTM roles are absolutely incredible. I wake up, and I'm just like. I'm on PTO right now. That's why I'm able to do these calls. But I wake up, I black out my entire apartment, headphones in, hoodie on, And I'm just building. And there's no sales calls. There's no. It's just, hey, this is the project. We need it delivered in X time. And I'm like, hey, don't bother me. I'm about to get to work.

Yeah. Yep. Mad scientist mode.

Exactly. So keep doing your thing, bro. Please. Let's stay in contact, you know? And when you finally do get that role, I definitely want to do this call again. You know, I want to hear about your experience.

Yeah, I'll. I think that would be awesome. And. And again, I really appreciate you letting me come on today to pick your brain.

Absolutely. Brian. I got you, my man. All right, bro. Yeah, stick around for a second. I'm gonna pause the recording, and. Yeah, it.